Phoenix Survey: Most Residents Okay With Life In Phoenix; Dissatisfaction Slightly Up

Phoenix City Manager David Cavazos sent a message to Phoenix employees praising them after results of a citywide Community Attitude Survey reveal that 95 percent of residents are pleased with customer service.

Not bad considering that in 2008, the survey showed that 86 percent of residents reported being treated professionally and courteously by employees.

Phoenix hires an independent research firm to conduct the survey every two years and measure residents attitudes toward life in the city and its leaders efforts to manage it.

That same survey revealed that 91 percent of Phoenix residents think the city is a good place to live, Cavazos wrote in his e-mail message to employees.

While a majority of residents seem happy with life in Phoenix, a comparison of the 2008 and 2010 survey show that Phoenix is slipping in other areas.

Quality of Life:

Most Phoenix residents -- 64 percent -- still report having an excellent or good quality of life, but that is down from the 2008 survey when 67 percent said they had an excellent or good quality of life in Phoenix. And that is even down from 70 percent in 2006.

By comparison, 10 percent of people said the quality of life in Phoenix was poor or very poor. Only 5 percent had reported feeling that way in the past three community surveys.

Downtown Phoenix:

While 62 percent of Phoenix residents in the 2010 survey believe that the heart of the city has improved, that down from 66 percent of residents in 2008. The majority still rules, but 12 percent of resident thought that downtown Phoenix had taken a turn for the worse. Two years ago, only 5 percent said that they thought it was worse.

City Services

Residents believe that Phoenix is doing most poorly in providing services for the homeless, job training and in attracting new employers, each of those areas snagging about a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

City library services, efforts at preserving mountains and deserts and loose trash pick-ups got top satisfaction ratings, with 7.7, 7.6 and 7.5 respectively.

Local Problems

Almost one in four Phoenix residents (22 percent) say that the biggest neighborhood problems that city leaders should be addressing is crime -- and, no, immigration does not even come up in this category.

Fifteen percent of Phoenicians say that city should be tackling ways to improve transportation, that is street conditions, traffic congestion and lack of public transit. Another 10 percent of people believe that Phoenix leaders should be working on economic issues, like creating jobs and attracting employers.

Only 6 percent of people interviewed said that the city should be working to solve immigration issues.